FDU Doerfler Innovation Center

Project Details

Project Description

Taking an integrated approach to innovation, FDU is focused on providing a campus full of innovation pockets—makerspaces, entrepreneurship and innovation centers, places for student engagement and idea catalysts. Completed this April, the Doerfler Innovation Center is a foundational project in this effort to revolutionize the learning environment as one where active learning, project-based learning, and the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and activated.

To prepare students for the rapidly changing business/interdisciplinary environment and emerging global trends, in which innovation and entrepreneurship play an increasingly important role, FDU sought a visible, identifiable space for proof-of-concept work, business incubation, and collaboration opportunities for FDU faculty and students. For FDU, the key to a sustainable future is to develop the ability of students—our future citizens and leaders—to become holistic, interdisciplinary problem solvers, finding creative ways to simultaneously create greater social, environmental, and economic prosperity.

Within hours of an advance opening, professors assembled an interactive class session on organizational change management, peers pitched and positioned products for a marketing course, a group of students acted out restorative justice skits, and collaboratively worked through complex organic chemistry equations. Situated between the all-quiet library upstairs and the large social gathering area at the entrance, the Doerfler Innovation Center struck a perfect balance for seriousness and collaboration – a long-desired space for students of all majors and minors.

The Doerfler Innovation Center transformed the lower floor of the Monninger Center for Learning and Research on FDU’s Florham Campus into an exciting and engaging space:
• A space that supports group projects as well as full-class discussion and individual work
• Write-on walls and movable whiteboard partitions
• Flexible furniture with a variety of seating & table types to fit one to two dozen users
• A motivating environment with a welcoming ambiance & reconfigurable settings
• A transparent, fun, colorful space that includes a variety of sub-environments
• Learning on display

Tour the space in 3D here: http://bit.ly/2qU8TgH